vantage-sh/handbook.vantage.sh

The Cloud Cost Handbook is a free, open-source, community-supported set of guides meant to help explain often-times complex pricing of public cloud infrastructure and service providers in plain english.

Cloud Cost Handbook

This is the repository backing the site hosted at handbook.vantage.sh.

The Cloud Cost Handbook is a free open-source community-supported set of guides meant to help explain the complex pricing of public cloud infrastructure and service providers in "plain English." This guide is open for anyone to contribute their knowledge to the community. Vantage employees will maintain hosting the guide for everyone and ensure that content is relevant and adheres to style guides.

The Cloud Cost Handbook is organized into two sections: general concepts and per-service pages.

• General concepts are meant to cover topics that apply across multiple different infrastructure services.
• Per-service pages are meant to give a brief summary of the service, the pricing dimensions of the service, and optionally, a list of cost concepts as it relates to that service.

Contributing Guidelines

Issues and pull requests (PRs) are welcome for requesting or contributing content. Vantage employees will review all issues and PRs to ensure we're keeping content relevant and up to standard. You're welcome to get in contact with us on our Slack Community as well where we have a devoted #cloud-cost-handbook channel for discussion as it relates to the handbook.

Installing Dependencies

This site uses mkdocs. Install the following requirements:

pip install --user mkdocs
pip install --user mkdocs-material

Making and Reviewing Changes

Prior to opening a pull request, please review your changes locally:

1. Create a separate feature branch, based on the master branch, and add your changes.
2. From your feature branch, run mkdocs serve.
3. Access and review your changes locally at http://localhost:8000/.
4. Open a PR and we will review your request as well as suggest any other changes.

Deploying

Once a PR is merged to the master branch, this will trigger a GitHub Actions workflow, which will deploy the site to GitHub Pages. To deploy the site locally, run:

mkdocs gh-deploy --ignore-version

Keep Up To Date

Feel free to watch/star this repo as we're looking to update the site regularly with additional services and concepts. Vantage also works on the following relevant projects:

• EC2Instances.info: An open-source tool for comparing EC2 instance prices and configurations.
• The AWS Cost Leaderboard: A hosted site of the top AWS cost centers.
• Vantage: A cloud cost transparency platform.

handbook.vantage.sh's Issues

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

General Concept: Spot

Add Fargate Spot Concept to Fargate service page

We don't currently have a concept for Fargate Spot on the Fargate section. Just giving an over view of this (and potentially a section on capacity providers) would also be worthwhile.

Amazon Redshift

Include Section On Graviton In EC2

I think it's definitely worth mentioning Graviton instances in EC2 (and other services that use them, but of course EC2 is the backbone of those). It's almost always the way to go when choosing instance types.

AWS WAF - Web Application Firewall

Mention Log Group Retention For CloudWatch

CloudWatch costs are unnecessarily driven up when teams fail to specify retentions for their log groups (as we've discovered a few times). I think it's worth mentioning this as an advisory.

Add reference to CloudFront Security Savings Bundle for AWS CloudFront service page

Mentioned by an AWS representative: "AWS recently launched the CloudFront Security Savings Bundle which allows customer to easily discount their total CloudFront bill by 30%: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/02/introducing-amazon-cloudfront-security-savings-bundle/"

Add action to deploy on push to main

Same as docs repo https://github.com/vantage-sh/docs.vantage.sh/blob/master/.github/workflows/main.yml

Add handbook pages for top 20 services not covered

Start with redshift and SQS

AWS Secrets Manager

Update Slack link on pages

Update Slack link per https://vantagesh.slack.com/archives/C01T1QYLY06/p1698089833069809 as old one is out of date. Also can fix formatting on some of the notes that are out of the box like here: https://handbook.vantage.sh/tools/cost-reports/.

AWS Certificate Manager

NAT Gateway specific page

From looking at Google Search console search results it appears there is a pretty significant amount of volume around "NAT Gateway Pricing" and we have [rightfully] bundled this information under EC2-Other. In addition to the EC2-Other work, we should probably somewhat redundantly have a NAT Gateway specific section to pull out here.

Include DLM In EBS Section

You did mention stranded volumes, but DLM is a good service that can automate cleaning these up.

Include Price-Capacity-Optimized Strategy for EC2/EMR

Price-capacity-optimized is the new way to go with Spot fleets. This just became supported for EMR recently (finally!)

What is the currency of displayed costs?

Searched everywhere. Except for Dollar sign $ there is no mention of which country dollar that is. Can anyone clarify?

General Concept: Autoscaling

Mentioned as something good to add by Levi McCormick. When adding this as a General Concept, please just make sure you add it to the sidebar as well on the mkdocs.yml file.

Mention Vantage Slack Community in Contribution Section

Hey @EverettBerry - I think we should mention the #cloud-cost-handbook channel for the Slack community in the contribution section of each page which you can see here:

We've had a few people popping in recently mentioning some topics and it may be worth advertising that a bit more.

Include Graviton In ECS Fargate

Graviton also works for ECS Fargate (but can't work with Spot, which is probably a point worth making).

Amazon Polly

Add an AWS service page for Amazon Polly

AWS CloudTrail